Welcome back to another “Brophy’s blog”!

It has been a while since I have last blogged and the purpose of this blog is to keep you up to date as to what the team have been up and to give you some insight and a potential sneak peek into the future!… (of Team Brophy and activities!).

So to recap since an eventful and historical day for myself on the 1^st of September up to the present day has been like getting on a never ending train. Going back to the day of my swim, I arrived on French, sandy soil around 10pm and the next few hours involved the worse boat ride I have endured to date. Having been battling the elements and very strong waves the boat and its crew faced the full brunt of the elements racing back to Dover. It felt like we were in a speed boat race with the boat flying over waves and rocking side to side. On top of this it was raining heavily most likely the waves hitting the boat made it all that worse. We arrived back in the early hours of the morning and the next 3 days I stayed in Dover as I started to recover from the body trauma. I then continued to rest and recover for another week before I was able to eat freely again. Thankfully I was fit enough to then travel for my week long holiday where I was able to relax on a nice sandy hot beach and recover mentally. Despite having the sea on the door step of the hotel, I never went swimming for the whole week, instead preferring the sun bed and hotel pool!

Two weeks on from my swim I returned to England but I was straight off to my final year of university having my placement year work to complete. A few months later I returned to Dover to collect my official certificate and swim route map which to this day is at home as I haven’t had to chance to frame it just yet! Christmas and New Year soon came by and as I finally hoped I could get a few days of to celebrate my Channel Swim I quickly realised it wouldn’t be possible and only spent 4 days at home due to exam preparation. This has been the case to date, in my final year of university; it has been oh so intense and has resulted in studying on average 7am till 8pm every day including most weekends! This has meant regular training has been a real challenge, and the university famous colds have meant training has been difficult to say the least.

However, my time at university is sadly coming to an end and in a few months I will be back into the real world where I can start to get my training back on track. Yes that does mean I may have some future challenges in mind for myself and the team!

So let talk about the future, as you may be aware it is not just me who is currently in their final year of university, indeed the majority of the team are, or in fairly new jobs. This has result in Team Brophy taking a year out and allowing us to focus on university and to research future activities. We’re going to be keeping any plans a secret until July where we will be able to officially announce our next challenge. One of the things we have been keen to do is some smaller team challenges and the possibility of an open invitation to all of Team Brophy (you guys!) to get involved if you so wished. But I will also be looking to make a splash in the water in the future for another individual event.

To help celebrate Team Brophy’s re launch and slightly new set up around July time we are hopeful of releasing a channel swim video including all the previously un seen photos and videos to give everyone a real insight to the swim itself. One of the other ideas I am currently thinking about is switching some of my future written blogs over to a video blog format. The reason being I think I am better at explaining verbally rather than written but what do you all think? Please leave a comment below or on our social media pages. Also if you know of any potential challenges swimming or non-swimming related please do let us know!

That’s all from me for now, I best get back to work, no rest for wicked huh?! Thanks for reading and continued support to me and the team.

Brophy